Close your eyes, think of the last time you did something stupid — but didn’t get caught. You’re only human, right? But what if the whole world witnessed your slip?

Edmonton author Steven Sandor’s new book Trolled (Lorimer) plunges into the complicated waters we now live in, where one can do or say something in the heat of the moment in anger or ignorance and, oops, it echoes permanently — replicated and visible anywhere.

Well-preserved and edited down to its most offensive essence, such inflammatory sparks then start fresh fires of outrage, escalating into a sort of arms race — if not outright war — out in the burning wilds of social media. Beyond shaming, gut-wrenching real-world consequences are often not far behind. Outrage has never been so instantaneous, yet permanent, as it is now.

But let’s back up for a second. Trolled, Sandor’s most recent young adult novel, starts off with a kid named Andy who wants nothing more than to join Canada’s national swim team. He’s good enough, too, though money’s an issue after his dad gets laid off. A stroke of luck arrives when, after a remarkable performance of him surfing a flutterboard goes viral, Andy realizes he can capitalize on his new-found fame and raise money to get to a qualifying meet in Edmonton. Things are looking bright for the kid.

Throughout the book’s 144 pages, Sandor is a master of summoning two serious tensions, the first being a hold-your-breath, first-person torpedoing down the swim lanes. “You wouldn’t know by my body shape currently,” Sandor says over spicy fries, “but I swam in high school. I wasn’t very fast, but our team was really good because we had a guy on our team who swam on the national team.

“So we milked him,” he laughs. The writer reminisces about backstroking in the provincials. “I still had a race to go and we only needed one point and we’d mathematically clinch. My coach said to me, ‘Just don’t get disqualified and don’t drown.’ I basically rec-swam a race. I finished dead last. But we got the point.”

Sandor is editor of Avenue Magazine, a sports broadcaster and longtime Edmonton writer. He’s authored half a dozen books, including one exhuming a century of Alberta’s hockey rivalry, and a young adult novel called Crack Coach about, well, a coach on crack.

While his personal experience with shaming runs about as deep as facing a series of hissy emails for (barely) slamming a New Order CD, his writing summons suffocating tension when things go wrong for Andy after he does something awful. His earlier fame quickly fades, his fans now a wrathful mob.

“The Internet is the new place for us to show up with our pitchforks and torches in the middle of the night. We’re really quick to judge people.

“People do bad things, but we’re getting to the point where we’re going past criticism and on to piling on. I say to myself, ‘Does this Internet shaming fit the crime’?”

This is exactly the question posed in Trolled after Andy follows a hazing dare made by older swimmers involving a superstar contender, a young woman who happens to be Muslim. While not intentionally racist, Andy’s misogyny and cultural ignorance beamed to social media return to him like a mountain dropping from the sky.

“A kid does something stupid, which can be internally handled — but how far will that Internet outrage go?” Sandor asks. “At what point to do people say someone’s been punished enough? It just doesn’t go away.

“Everyone should be responsible for everything they say and do, but we’re still getting comfortable with the idea everything we say is getting out there.”

Asked if he considered that the novel might be seen as controversial, Sandor says, “believe it or not, in the editing process, we actually ramped it up. She wasn’t Muslim in the first draft. We thought, ‘Let’s really make it more of a moral question.’ My character did something racially insensitive — let’s go there — but is there a way back?

“Especially for a younger reader, we want to challenge them with not such an easy question to answer. The culture of bullying is already out there, but when you’re policing each other on the Internet, it gets a little bit scary.”

In the book and in person, Sandor explores how forgiveness is a ferociously personal decision.

“I’m not anti-Internet in any way. Making the world a smaller place is awesome. But the human race is naturally bad at self-editing. You need to ask, ‘is this really me talking? Or is this drunk me? Angry me?’ Because the things that make us angry, 10 minutes later you wonder why you were so mad.

“Maybe at some point we’ll all just put a naked picture of ourselves on the Internet, say something that’s going to outrage everybody, and be done with it.”

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